But the catch was that this was never a sustainable long-term strategy, at least not for the purposes of promoting an open ecosystem. User-generated data is vulnerable to a family of sub optimizations such as Goodhart’s Law, in which using a “measure” as a “metric” devalues the measure itself. If you’re Google building PageRank on natural weblinks ... See more

The platform economy as it is currently constituted—highly centralized, highly mediated, with critical decisions made by a select few—risks replicating the same problems that have led to widespread burnout, financial precarity, and erosion of workers’ rights in the traditional economy.

The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are sharing content that sends other users off-site. But, over time, they try to get more content hosted on their own systems, and to promote it more relative to the competition. Google, while not a social pla... See more

In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible prici... See more